sarah woodjetts​multi channel ecommerce consultant

E-Commerce of Christmas Past

Christmas 2013 bought high hopes for big sales, but did it all go as planned? John Lewis reported that their sales were up by 22.6% with their total sales for the Christmas period amounting to £734m. House of Fraser held the holidays responsible for “the best ever online sales” which were up 57.7% from last year. Amazon Prime broke records with a million new customers and more items shipped than ever before. Also a “best ever” for Amazon, figures showed that 36.8m items were sold on Cyber Monday - that’s an amazing 426 items per second! Black Friday was dubbed 2013’s biggest online sales day while Christmas Day saw not only twice as many visits to online retailers as last year but a huge boom in m-commerce as well. On Christmas Day, 58% of all sales and 75% of all traffic was caused by mobile devices, smartphones in particular. Boxing Day is a hugely popular day for shopping, so it’s no surprise that this year was the biggest Boxing Day on record for online shopping, with a massive 129m visits to online retailers, a 40.4% increase on last year’s figures.